Is PeopleString.com A Scam?

So what is it? Well according to them, PeopleString.com is trying to become the next best thing to…..Facebook. Their spiel is that on thier social network site they will share in the revenue they make from all those ads. This may sound very familiar because MyLot.com works very much the same way but is has been established as legitimate for many years now. In any event, PeopleString claims they give back 70% of advertisers income to their members. But obviously the advertisers are hoping that you're paying attention to their ads. I don't know about you but when I am on Facebook, I tend to ignore most of the ads. Well PeopleString can't have that, in order to convince advertisers to sign up with them they need to show the members click on the ads.

So to ensure this, members get credit for using different things they offer on the site and sponsored by advertisers, to please them and generate income, The more you use it, the more credit you get. Because of that, it also becomes a money making opportunity. I go into detail later how all that works, don't worry! On top of that, they have a patented free email system that lets you use video email as well as technology to track, recall and destroy emails once they have been sent. Think about how many times you've sent off a reckless email and wished you could take it back. So this technology is pretty impressive.

In any event, signing up for PeopleString.com is Free which I know all of you love. There is an option to upgrade to Entrepreneur Membership Status for a one time fee of $200. All this does is give you higher percentages of the payouts and better email storage options. But remember it is optional, and they do not push it down your throat which is always a good thing in my book.

For those of you who care about this official kind of thing, you should know the parent company, BigString.com, is a publicly traded company listed on the NY Stock Exchange with a million users. BigString.com is basically behind patented email service that I mentioned earlier that lets you track your emails and recall it, erase it once sent (after a set period of time), and can put a tag on it so it cannot be printed. So PeopleString doesn't seem to be a small fry company considering this type of back up parent company. Personally I take stuff like this with a grain of salt, sort of like BBB ratings. It's nice but it doesn't guarantee anything in my mind. I tend to pay more attention to the word on the street of the people that actual use the company. But to each their own.

How do you make money with People String.com?

When you sign up for your free membership and log in the first time you are bombarded with "Deals of the Day" that offer points and credit options. For returning members this is fine, a new member will be confused by this. Once that is closed down, you end up looking at a page that looks like your Facebook page, but with way more ads. All the things you would expect are there, invite friend, "write something," profiles, all that stuff. So the social network piece is there, you would just start inviting friends and start conversations.

To make thing easy for you they let you link instantly to major email sites, (MSN,GMail, Yahoo etc) IM and Social Networks. Really, you can instantly click to your Facebook page! The ideda is that this would be your home page, then you would be able to get to those other places easy. But that is neither here nor there as I am here to try to tell how how you can make money with this thing.

They keep track of two sets of numbers. Money Credits and People Points. Remember those Deals of the Day they bombard you with when you log on? You either earn Points or they give you Credit. It tells you right there on the ad how much and what type of point/credit you get. With these offers you will recognize elements of some of the other programs I have talked about here in the past. It is like Paid Surveys (My Survey), Pay-per-Click (Clixsense) and getting paid to fill out forms, ( Fusion Cash) all wrapped into this one social network site.

People Points are earned for the things that show you are using the site. The number of People Points you gather is what they use to figure out how much of the 70% they give back ends up in your account. You can get these points if you click on ads on the site, or you use their branded Google Search Bar, or you sign up for a free newsletter and if you use their email. You get points each time you log in, so you could sign in and out up to 4 times a day for more credit. Believe it or not, you get 10 points for linking to your Facebook account. Why would they reward you for using their rival? My best guess is there is some computer information sharing thing happening. But I think you get the picture. Use all the stuff they throw on there, and you get points. Points convert to dollars from the company. 100 points is worth One Dollar.

Money Credit is for when you do things that go to the next step. If you BUY something from an advertiser, you get lots of Money Credit. If you take a survey, or write reviews you will earn Money Credit. To make spending your money so much easier they have this thing called Shopping Mall where it links to major online shopping spots that PeopleString.com negotiated ways to give cash rebates for purchases. Shop online through these links, you get money credit to you account. This should all sound familiar if you have used SwagBucks.

How to make more money with PeopleString.

1. Mailbox-Cashbox is their signature money making offer.

Filling out an interest survey gets you $1.50 to your money credit. Next, you get a postcard in the mail with special codes. This verifies that you are a real person. Go back to Mailbox-Cashbox area of the site, enter those codes, and you officially entered to the program. PeopleString will now send you advertiser's postal mail with unique advertiser codes that you enter into your account. You can even set the number of mail that you want to receive. Some will arrive in your mail, and some will be found on your Mailbox-Cashbox online account. Credit is earned based on the number of advertisement codes you enter. This whole thing is kind of like Hits4Pay, but to me it gets complicated as they do it through the mail! Confused? You are not alone.

In order to build up your Mailbox-Cashbox account members will receive up to $1.00 per person for getting other members to sign up and to enter their Mailbox-Cashbox codes.

2. Referrals To People String

All of this is well and good, and there is evidence that people actually make money with these programs, yet the expectation has been described as minimal. The real money comes from referrals which I get, they need to build up membership on these new sites and the quickest way to do it is with referrals.

At PeopleString.com, when you refer a new member, you not only get People Points, but you are also awarded 5% of the revenue that new member brings in. If you refer 100 members, and they each earn $25 in Money Credits, it falls out like this $1.25 a person X 100= $125). The idea is that those 100 people will love is so much that they go off and start referring more people that we in the business call it your down-line. You earn 2% of down-line revenue.

Between the original referrals and their down-lines, and getting all of your referrals to sign up for Mailbox-Cashbox, there is potential money to be made.

At the end of the day, getting massive number of referrals for programs like this is always much easier to achieve for trained affiliates because we know how to get in front of a large number of people using various internet marketing techniques. Most people find getting referrals daunting without such training. So you may need to focus on your individual efforts or convincing your family and friends why it's worth it to them to socialize on PeopleString vs Facebook.

3. Entrepreneur Package

As I mentioned earlier they have an upgrade membership that gives you a greater share of the advertiser dollar earned at PeopleString. Like it or not, most programs will have some kind of up-sell offered. It is how they make even more money. With PeopleString.com, you pay them $200, a one time fee, and your earning percentages are upped to 20% on your referrals and 6% on your downline. This package also gives you a domain name with 20 email accounts, and unlimited video email. I want you to remember guys, this site is free, and there is no huge push to upgrade, From where I stand, it is just an option to use when you find you are making money, particularly from referrals. Some will pay the $200 right off the bat, thinking they will get all these referrals to sign up and get the 20%. Me? I like to see how it works first before I spend my hard earned dollars, and so should you, if you get my drift. ” ?

When will PeopleString.com give me my share of the profits?

Free members will get paid once a month if they reach a $25 threshold, which rolls over if you did not meet it. Payment is by through a partnership with AlertPay, direct deposit or the old reliable check in the mail. You must fill in a IRS W-9 tax form before getting paid. All the information I read on the forums confirmed this, people did paid. Entrepreneur members will get paid twice a month, if they meet the threshold, of course.

What if I live outside the US?

According to the website, everything except the Mailbox-Cashbox is available to members outside of the US. Mailbox-Cashbox is only activated if your country can get vast numbers to join. That whole thing is advertiser driven. To get around that obstacle, outside the USA members can set up a Internet marketing campaign to target USA members to sign up under them, and then they get the % share. With that being said, I have to say the most common forum complaints I found were from outside the US members complaining about not getting paid and accounts being shut down. If I lived outside of North America, I'd probably pass on this one as a money maker.

Okay so now that we've babbled on about how this works. What's the dirt on this company because we all know no company is perfect. All of them have cons and it's always important for you to know what they are because we all view certain cons differently. At least knowing them can help you make an educated decision. So with that in mind, let's break them down. ” ?

Cons

•Complicated for no good reason. The first thing that stands out to me is how confusing and complicated their main money making offer, Mailbox-Cashbox post card system, seems to be. If you are familiar with Hits4Pay, it pretty much the same thing, you get credit for viewing ads, only PeopleString.com makes you put advertisers codes into their site yourself. I found all kinds of confusion out there about the post card thing. Bottom line? Way too complicated for many people, when it does not have to be.

•Large payout requirement. Like most of these non-traditional opportunities there is always a minimum payout amount before they send you a check. For PeopleString that magic amount is $25. It's not outrageously high, but let's keep it real. Without referrals it will take awhile to reach it as you can assume the advertisement payments are along the lines of Hits4Pay, Clixsense and other Pay-per-Click programs which don't pay a lot for viewing ads. That being said, you know I feel about multiple streams of income. The more the better especially when you get paid for stuff you're already doing for free. But I'm a wild boy like that with my wacky way of thinking.

•Expensive upgrade fee. Compared to Clixsense which only charges about $10 for an upgrade fee and offers similar money making options, $200 seems excessive to me and most people. If you're anything like me, I would at least wait until I earned my first $200 and use that $$ to upgrade, and even then, I'd have to have amazing monthly results to consider it. That being said we have to keep this all in perspective. The upgrade is purely optional so it's not like you're being forced to pay it.

•Lack of training on how to use the site. When the first thing you see is ads, and then you see a Facebook style page, and there is not an obvious TAKE A TOUR HERE button, you are just asking for confusion. To be fair, I saw on the PeopleString.com website there are links to two options for webinar/video training series. There are several videos on the forum on how to use the site. But you should not have to search that hard to find out how to use something like this.

•No sense of the number of advertisers. 70% sharing income sounds good, but 70% of nothing gives you nothing. Yeah, that is kind of extreme, but it is why I took so long investigating this thing. I simply cannot tell how many advertisers are joining up and if there is a good balance between earning from ads, surveys and signing up for newsletters and how much is based on referrals. What I do know, is everything I read mentioned how minimal the amount earned from using the site, and that referrals is the true money maker.

•Program may be on it's last legs. When this thing first started, in 2009 , there was all kinds of online chatter and blog posts by enthusiastic members trying to build referrals. I first started to look at this in the spring of 2010 and when I went back a second time a few months later, I did not find nearly the amount of chatter or current posts. Yea, there are still some blog posts trying to drum up referral business, but not at the same level. So I have to tell you it is a kind of red flag for me, as I have seen Beta tested sites like this fizzle. It could be just a fluke, but I am just tellin' ya what I noticed. I checked out the site, it is still there, up and running and functional.

Conclusion Is It a Scam?

Honestly, I'm really undecided about this company which is probably why I never joined even when it was being hyped up to me via private emails and all the banners I saw all over the web at the start of 2009. It just never sat right in my stomach. I also just felt it was too complicated to understand how to make money. My thought was if I don't understand how this damn thing works, how am I going to convince my loyal users to join it? So with that in mind I have passed on this opportunity and will continue to do so. Yes there have been some people that have been paid. There is no denying that. But it doesn't look like a lot of that has been happening recently that me and my research team can find. In my years of experience in this industry, that's usually a sign of sinking ship. I'm no Popeye the sailor man but I know that people shouldn't board sinking ships or stay on them. But that's me. You do what you feel is best for you. I could be totally wrong. I'm more inclined to stick with something similar that has been proven over the years at MyLot.com it's not perfect either but they consistently pay me every month and have been for years. It's where I go when I want to do some social chatting that gets me paid for my nonsensical online conversations.

Anyway, if you have joined People String and have been paid recently I would love to hear from you below. If you haven't been paid or experienced other issues, with this company, we'd like to hear from you too. The more information from both sides, the better. In any event this wraps up my review regarding PeopleString. I wish I could definitely say it's something you should try but I can't if I wouldn't try it. That's not my style. So we'll be moving on to the next one!